Monday 9 March 2009

I've Bought a Netbook

It's one of the Asus machines, with 16 MB of internal flash drive instead of a hard drive, so its power consumption is low and it runs for hours on one battery charge.

It runs Linux, though I suspect the user interface is contributed by Asus. It irritatingly presents a main menu that divides possible activities quite counter intuitively into such categories as 'Work', 'Learn', 'Play', and tasks are assigned to those categories quite haphazardly. For instance the quite reasonable graph drawing programme, which almost anyone who wants to draw graphs would classify as 'Play' and the rest would consider 'Work', comes instead under 'Learn'.

I haven't yet found how to change the categories, and the directory tree available seems to be incomplete. However I have found how to summon a terminal window and have started to explore the various directories there.

I may try to write some of my own commands - I suspect they go in the bin directory.

Hints would be welcome.

No comments :